Customer Reviews

Final Atonement: A Doug Orlando Mystery

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All mysteries with gay characters should be this "real". The book's central character, Doug Orlando, struggles with integrating his life as a gay man and a dectective while solving a crime that seems taken from a New York Post headline. The book is fascinating for anyone who has an interest New York City as the situations and characters are written with an affection for the city as well as a clear-eye for the foibles of New Yorkers. Outside New York, the truth, honesty, and excitement of the story will hold readers wherever they live. Quality mysteries don't come around very often. Well written mysteries with a central character who is gay are rare indeed. Both of the Doug Orlando stories will be a wecome addition to any mystery reader's collection.

Nobody does a better job of capturing the tensions between various minority groups in Brooklyn than Steve Neil Johnson in the Doug Orlando Mysteries, FINAL ATONEMENT and FALSE CONFESSIONS. Yet he expresses so much compassion for the characters and such a love for the neighborhoods that you feel like you've lived there your whole life and fought their battles with them. Doug Orlando, a Brooklyn Homicide cop, is a compelling and haunting character: ostracized by his fellow cops for testifying against his brutish former patrol-car partner, Briggs, in a grand jury probe, his life in danger as much from other cops as criminals. The heart of the story, though, is the relationship between Orlando and his partner of many years, Stewart, which is troubled but filled with love and humor. The plot itself is ripped-from-the-headlines: when a politically active right-wing rabbi is murdered in a bizarre manner in the city's Hasidic stronghold, Williamsburg, Orlando must track down the killer before hostilities between minority groups in the overcrowded city explode. The neighborhoods are so vividly described, you feel like you could taste them. Astute political commentary and memorable characters that stay with you long after you've finished the book make these novels special. Johnson's style is so sharp it cuts like a knife, and both books move at a rapid-fire pace that keeps you turning the pages. I highly recommend this captivating book.

An excellent first effort from Steve Johnson that centers around a comfortably gay police detective with normal colleague and relationship problems -- not to mention a nice twisted mystery that touches upon an powerkeg combination of race, religion and sex. Can't wait to read the second outing of detective Doug Orlando but my eagerness is tempered with the knowledge that only two entries exist in the series. I feel lucky I stumbled upon these out of print books.

Review by Randy Turoff, San Francisco Bay Times

Final Atonement, a Doug Orlando mystery by Steve Neil Johnson, is a perfect book to take on the plane or to escape from family chatter this holiday season. It's portable, a paperback and a remarkably cheap read for such good material.

The backbone of Final Atonement is, of course, the keenly executed plot, cut down to its bare bones with surgical precision. Rabbi Avraham Rabowitz, Hasidic right-wing slumlord, right-to-liver, and homophobe, is found bizarrely murdered in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Liberal, Italian gay detective Orlando is ordered by his superior, Lt. Reilly, to find the murderer. "Reilly thought the killer might be homosexual, and loved the idea of putting Orlando on a case that might be detrimental to the gay community."

Orlando's assigned partner is a beefy racist veteran cop named Briggs, against whom Orlando had once testified during a grand jury investigation into the shooting death of a black youth. Trouble starts immediately when Orlando sees the word "FAGGOT" scratched across the door of his blue Chevy, with Briggs chuckling loudly from across the street.

The character Doug Orlando is a rugged gay detective with an unshakable vision of justice. He works in the homicide division of the Brooklyn Police Department. Aside from his grisly job and his marked status as an outsider among his co-workers, he lives a regular life in Brooklyn with Stewart, an English professor. Orlando's lover of 12 years, Stewart is a "beautiful man with baby blue eyes and fine, striking features." Stewart was initially attracted to the handsome man in uniform, to his spiffy appearance and his fighter status. "There was something both profound and rawly sexual in sharing the fears and frustrations of the beat, and Stewart had responded with both caring and undisguised arousal. They had played the games that young lovers play, and sometimes his cap or nightstick found its way into the sweaty sheets." But after the big blow-out at the police department with Orlando testifying against a fellow cop, things got nasty and fearful. "Then the fantasy died. The cop stories were no longer a sexy game, a fantasy to enhance bedroom antics. Orlando's job had become dead serious."

Orlando is a man with a mission and a private vendetta to fulfill. He's tough and smart and also sensitive. He has a profound empathy toward all the people in his cases, as well as a transcendent understanding of the volatile political issues of the city. This makes him a terrific observer of his milieu and a super sleuth. He's got a special handle on the realities of other people's lives: their dreams, their fears, and their lifestyles and politics--not just their murderous impulses. Even in the midst of his own difficulties with Stewart, he's able to step aside and see the situation for its worth: "He was glad he and Stewart had talked the night before, cleared the air. Maybe nothing had been solved, but he felt better. Perhaps some of the stresses on a relationship were never smoothed out, just handled day to day. And that was okay. He knew that next time he needed comfort, he'd reach for Stewart, not a bottle of rum."

Characters make their appearances as the plot unfolds. The cast includes the likes of Donese Jones, a black welfare mother who lives in a Rabowitz tenement, with a righteous cause, a pit bull and an axe to grind; Leonard Lynch, a Trump-like mean-spirited entrepreneur intent on owning the city for personal gain, and at any cost; Herb Chiligny, a political columnist and lecherous gay activist operating through the lefty paper, The Village World; Jimmy Rodriguez, a teenage hoodlum with a sweet but clueless protective mother, the Reverend Melvin Packard, a vociferous grassroots leader in the black community who demands revenge for the killings in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach; Menachem Rabowitz, an ultra-traditionalist Hasid and feuding brother of the murder victim; Ronnie Bell, a dyke medical examiner and good friend of the woman injured in the bombing of an abortion clinic; and all of Rabowitz's immediate family and political cronies.

Steve Neil Johnson has created a microcosm of New York City, particularly Brooklyn, in this fast-paced and deftly written book. His descriptions are accurate and to the point, whether he's describing a shooting gallery full of junkies, a tenement, a skyscraper penthouse office, or a dwelling in Hasidic Williamsburg.

Until the very end, the question remains: Who killed Rabbi Avraham Rabowitz? The ethnic, political and personal rivalries are so intense and interconnected that everyone seems to have a motive. It's up to Detective Doug Orlando to uncover the truth and bring the murderer to justice before the city explodes from the tensions and paranoias of deep-seated and long-standing enmities.

The man behind Doug Orlando is author Steve Neil Johnson. He drew from his experiences living in Brooklyn and working for the borough's district attorney. He now lives in Los Angeles and is working on another Doug Orlando mystery.